Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [127]
For some steerage passengers, vaccination aboard a ship at sea was just one inconvenience among many. For others, the experience was overwhelming. Steamship companies insisted they were merely providing a service, one required of them in order to do business in American ports. Passengers, they said, were at liberty to refuse the service and face the consequences. But the true test of liberty lies in its exercise. Liberal political theorists since John Locke had suggested that real human freedom and consent required physical space—“room enough”—for their exercise. Liberty needs an exit.24
Mary O’Brien was just seventeen when she boarded the Cunard Steamship Company’s Catalonia in Queenstown, Ireland. The Catalonia set sail for Boston on the Fourth of July, 1889. Mary had never been away from home, and her mother had recently died. She made the journey with her father and brother, traveling in a steerage compartment with three or four hundred strangers.25
When the Catalonia was about three days out from Boston, Mary sat with other female passengers on deck. A ship steward approached and told them to go below. Not knowing the purpose, Mary descended the staircase into steerage. At the landing, halfway down, she passed the ship’s surgeon, I. T. M. Griffin, who stood with two stewards. She continued to the bottom of the stairs. All of the ship’s female steerage passengers had been lined up at the foot of the stairs and were making their way slowly up. The male passengers were nowhere to be seen. (Mary later learned that her father and brother, along with all the rest, had been taken to another part of the ship.) As the line moved forward, Griffin inspected each woman’s arm and “proceeded to vaccinate those that had no mark.” As they passed inspection, each woman received a card from a steward—a vaccination certificate to be presented to the port physicians. Mary held back until she was the last woman on the stairs. She later recalled that she saw “no means of exit except where the surgeon stood.” She told Griffin that she knew from her mother that she had been vaccinated as a baby. He said there was no mark, and she “must be vaccinated.”26
It seemed to Mary that no time at all had passed between that utterance and the sensation of Griffin’s penknife scraping her left arm and the dabbing on of some stuff from a glass tube. By her own admission, she had not spoken out; she had not struggled. But she would later testify before a Boston jury that she had been vaccinated against her will and that the vaccine had made her sick. The judge instructed the jury that there was no evidence to support O’Brien’s claim of assault. Hearing the case on appeal in 1891, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts agreed. To reasonable men of privilege and power—on a bench that included the future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—the young Irishwoman’s legal claim may have seemed absurd. But, O’Brien’s lawyers argued, “a distinction must be drawn between mere submission and positive consent.” In the closed space below the waterline, separated from home and family, the immigrant girl had, by all appearances, passively submitted. Seeing